


A Conversation Between a Vicar and a General

by oneinspats



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, 19th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, Napoleonic Era RPF, english history RPF
Genre: Divinity, Gen, a conversation, just an additional thing you can tack on to the end of A Wolf in Chase, there's a lot of bad theology happening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 18:59:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8857117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: Napoleon and Batley have a conversation about the nature of God's love and murder fairies.





	

The notion of the divine being within these creatures has occurred to Batley. He had sat in his study and pulled down all those old volumes of early church fathers that had remained neglected on shelves. When he did so dust cascaded down, thick and intransigent – he was unable to brush it entirely from his clothes. He hated it.

But now he is immersed in them. Wanting to plunge his entire body into the words and text and watch it line his skin as it lines the pages. No one here in Woodford understands this compulsion to be immolated by words. They are farmers and labourers and the few educated people around are left over soldiers and petty gentry. What had been their instinct when faced with the miraculous? They had wanted to shoot it. The only person who had been pained by this reaction had been a botanist sent up from London to investigate the strange happenings in Northamptonshire but his reasoning was as earth bound as everyone else’s.

How can you think to catalogue the divine? Batley is mystified. You cannot apply Linnaean Taxonomy to the mystic. You cannot put it in a compartment in a curiosity cabinet and ship it to the Royal Society with a monograph. You cannot.

In the Medieval world they understood these things to be outside of God’s creation and so outside of Christianity and outside of human understanding and morality. There was God’s world, which is everything created in seven days six thousand years ago, and the Non-God’s world, which is what was here before and after and outside. The theology is weak. Batley dislikes its lack of rigour and cleanliness. He prefers the abolishment of all superstition that reigns in his Anglican church.

 His black coat, of stately quality for a country vicar, remains marred by dust.

The creatures that have come from the forest are monstrous. This is what he thinks hangs most people up since when humans see beasts they think that killing them is the only way forward. The glow of a wolf’s eyes in underbrush causes a hunter to find a trigger. But he hates this. He has railed against the destruction of the monstrous simply because it is monstrous in sermons. God is monstrous – he wants to shout at them. Angels are monstrous! The divine is monstrous! Did not Saint Paul refer to the terror of God? His abject fear upon the road to Damascus? That terror of the holy? That terror of the Lord?

But this is unorthodox thinking and Batley wishes to be an orthodox man. If Nicholas of Cusa was correct and God is _posse_ , that is all possibility – not just _esse_ , being, or _nihil_ , nothingness but _posse_ then this naturally confirms God’s infinite abilities and therefor if God is infinite and capable of all things then he is capable of creating unfathomable creatures out of fairy tales and instill into them the divine.

He cannot sit in this dusty room anymore with these duty tomes and these tangled thoughts of divinity. He dawns coat and hat and heads out to Woodford commons. The grass is no longer green, it is uprooted from fighting his divine-non-divine creatures. The cross still stands. The one that has always been there and he leans against it, fishes for tobacco and pipe in his pockets but does not find them.

 

Woodford’s forest, called Shrubbery, still looms in the distance. From there came the creatures that many called Fairy and those creatures wretched through Woodford’s people. They wore their skin and assumed their shape and Batley had not been able to tell them apart from other humans until the glamour faded and what he had seen had been monstrous and terrible and divine.

One of the heroes of that brief, fleeting battle between human and the unknown comes towards him wearing green. It is a corporal’s uniform which Batley cannot understand since the man is a general. All these leftover soldiers. What do you do with war horses once the war is over? They are going to speak French since Batley cannot manage Italian and the man coming towards him cannot manage English.

‘Do you think the fairies capable of humanity?’ Batley asks.

‘Perhaps. How do you define humanity, monsieur?’

‘The presence of a soul, of the ability to communicate, the ability to love, feel compassion, to have complex emotional experiences, to remember and forget. To create.’

‘By that standard, then, certainly they are capable of humanity.’

Batley frets. He says, ‘you do not sound concerned!’

‘Should I be?’

‘If they are then we have all committed murder.’

‘As have they. Monsieur, I have marched armies there and back again across all of Europe. I beg of you to forgive me a lack of sentimentality over the dead. Especially monstrous dead.’

They begin walking alongside one another. Batley wishes to explain himself. Of the few who are educated in this village he feels the general is the best read on theological matters. He has visited the man’s study and has seen the holy books and the ones on philosophy and questions of the human condition. Batley wonders how best to begin. 

The general says musingly, ‘where I’m from there is a certain acceptance of what you would call the monstrous. Such things are understood to be proof of God’s power over nature and man.’

Batley nods for that is an old thought. One that transcends Christianity and Paganism and other heresies. Batley reasons that this means it must hold some water. He says, ‘Some would say that monsters are revelations of God and reflect his ineffable purpose. That they are revelations of his divine imagination and monstrous faces are more truly divine than beautiful faces.’

‘Do you believe it?’

‘I don’t know. Do you, general?’

‘There is beauty in the grotesque, although I cannot claim to see it personally. I do not necessarily agree with all I have read on it. Do you believe God is good?’

‘I do. Of course I do.’

‘God’s love is a paradox. Full of strangeness and mystery and one I have found cold and off putting. God’s love is a kind of vertigo. One time I almost fell off a road in the Alps. I was a young man and trying to move with all haste into Italy like Hannibal and I almost fell. That vertigo of being upon cliff edge with the wind, the feeling of falling without movement, is what I imagine God’s love to feel like. When I was an altar boy, a brief and disastrous career that ended with my getting a well-deserved hiding, my great-uncle, a holy man, asked me to describe God’s love. I could not and still cannot. It defies attempts to control and contain. Tell me what it is to you.’

‘Everything.’

‘That word is insufficient, vicar.’

‘I agree.’

‘It is a tide, the ocean above you. Have you been on a storm tossed ship? The towering walls of water above you. That is what it is. It is also an abyss and an endless free fall. It is a grasping obsession, like death, and a gaping open wound of the sky. It is the heavens and it is beyond the heavens. It is earthy and sensuous, as all love is earthy and sensuous, but it is removed and cold. Galatea to her Pygmalion. We create God’s love because God created us to love. How do you escape that?’

‘You cannot.’

‘No. You cannot.’

‘Do you believe in God, general?’

‘I think the divine is well beyond our comprehension and any sense of humanity. It is fierce. It does not flinch. It is queer and familiar, grotesque and beautiful, somber and joyous and awesome. Faith is like falling.’

Batley thinks that the general is confiding something to him. They are now by the gate to his home and the general touches the brim of his hat.

‘These fairies we fought, whatever you wish to call them, do you think them divine?’ Batley must ask.

‘No. I do not.’

‘But they are everything you have described the divine to be. They are more than what  _I_ have labeled mere humanity.’

The general gives him a long look. He wants to flee for the man’s eyes are uncomfortable. The general is, in Batley’s experience, an uncomfortable man. 

‘I think you subscribe too much to the power of God and not enough to the ingenuity and ability of mankind. I would never say humanity is  _mere._  We are great and terrible and capable of all possible and, sometimes, impossible things. You are a man of God, you know in whose image we are supposedly made.’

‘I don’t think you _actually_  believe in God.’

The general pats his cheek with a deeply ironic smile.

‘I have told you, monsieur, I did not fall off the cliff in the Alps.’


End file.
